Posts Tagged ‘Il Bisonte’

In shopping, as in life, we sometimes don’t know what we’re searching for until it’s staring us right in the face. Like this Il Bisonte leather bag in the just-exactly-perfect shade of blue, for instance, which I discovered only hours ago, and without which life now feels incomplete. It’s one of a bumper crop by the Italian leather goods house that Venice Beach boutique Heist has just started carrying, and I’m literally sitting here trying to scramble my Amex card number in my brain to keep from making an order.

Several lifetimes ago, I found myself following a rock star around Europe for a feature in Spin. She was on tour with her band and retinue, and one night, in the very tiniest hours, we all found ourselves at the Oslo airport, waiting for a ground crew to show up and load the band’s equipment on to the rock star’s rent-a-jet. Every concession in the airport was closed, and—with precisely zero in the way of gift shops or newsstands to look to for amusement—I found myself staring down one of those cheap business card machines that print while you wait. I didn’t really need business cards—Spin had taken care of that because I was on their masthead as an editor at large—but this seemed like it could be the source of at least twenty solid minutes of fun. The machine allowed users to select from a variety of backgrounds, and I decided on a soothing blue-green waterfall scene. For the text, I chose simply:

KIM FRANCE
60 MG PROZAC, 50MG ZOLOFT

Until fairly recently, that card—so flip and overshare-y and prototypically me circa 1998 that it might as well have been a photograph—was the only one I’d ever actually made for myself. There was always a job, and a nice little paper token of my progress as a professional to go with it. During the year I took off, there was little use for one, but then the blog started going, and I required something to hand out at the odd professional event, or when I found myself occasionally in the kind of meeting where other participants volley theirs at you, and it’s kind of awkward not to have something to volley back. So I got some from moo, and they look fantastic and the paper quality is beyond anything you’d expect for the price. So good, in fact, that putting more than three in my wallet at a time presents drastic overcrowding problems. And because I tossed my old J Crew card case when I got tossed from my old job, it feels like high time to get another. This one appeals, because how could it not?

I like the idea of bright card holders, because they’re just that much easier to detect in your bag. And this rough-hewn version from Il Bisonte has the extra added advantage of being roomy enough to serve as an auxiliary wallet on occasions when you want to shove your cash, ID, and credit cards into something that will fit into the smallest of evening bags.

Pretty much everything from Pierre Hardy costs a fortune,which is too bad, because so much of it—and in particular pieces with the brand’s trademark geometric print—are fantastic. Get yourself something on this scale, however, and you can satisfy you luxury jones without guilt.

If pulling a card out of a gold Alexander McQueen skull case does not say I mean business, then I don’t know what does.

For the dire minimalist: Architect/designer Alice Park’s folded card holders, which come in a variety of happy and quite stylish colors.

There are a lot of these platform fisherman’s sandals around for spring. And every time I see them, I think of the type of girl they remind me of from high school. The one who hung out with the stoners but was secretly in all accelerated classes; who was kind of bitchy until she liked you, and even then always kept you guessing.